Floating Pavilion – IX Biennale di Architettura
An exhibition on water in the Gaggiandre of the Arsenale of Venice
The Arsenale encloses the vast waters of Venice. It is a special and magic place, surrounded by the city’s unique walls. For more than a decade the Arsenale has welcomed many events of the Venice Biennale. The 2004 Architecture Biennale presented the first ever example of a floating pavilion created to host the Cities of Water exhibition. The pavilion rested on the water, absorbing its qualities, and exploiting its potentials.
The water pavilion fully expressed the ambiguity between land and water characteristic of Venice: instable, flexible, expandable, made of simple and modular materials. Its architecture is born of a principle of addition, based on the assembly of the simple elements common to the city’s architecture straddling land and water: modular rafts, mooring poles and a lightweight steel structure clad in undulating polycarbonate panels.
A skin that was capable of absorbing variations in light and the changing reflections of the water, the pavilion was a metaphor of Venice, an immaterial and virtual city.
Drawings
